


stay

by dilangley



Category: Uncharted (Video Games)
Genre: Elena's perspective, F/M, Post-UC1, Sex but not full-blown smut, The aftermath of El Dorado
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-15
Updated: 2018-02-20
Packaged: 2019-03-05 06:40:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13382301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dilangley/pseuds/dilangley
Summary: "In these stories, stories like today, stories where the hero saved the day and the sun set in a splash of brilliant oranges and reds, girls like Elena Fisher were the prize."Or the aftermath of El Dorado in which Elena is not the spoils but the victor.





	1. Chapter 1

Elena Fisher appreciated a good story. Her wallet had ten library cards, ten little slivers of plastic balancing the line between temporary and permanent. The cards promised her she would be somewhere long enough to read good books, promised her she would come back, but each one whispered to the others, _She won’t stay. She doesn’t stay._

The library cards weren’t wrong.

In these stories, stories like today, stories where the hero saved the day and the sun set in a splash of brilliant oranges and reds, girls like Elena Fisher were the prize. To the victor, the spoils. Perhaps she should tell Nathan Drake that the plot diagram for this evening would match the expectation but not the reason.

When he smiled, fire licked its way up from her toes over the long, clean bones of her inner thighs to settle and burn in her stomach. But she wasn’t the spoils. She was the victor.

After Nate abandoned her on a Peruvian dock, she smooth talked her way into a discounted boat and caught up with him just in time to save his ass. When he wanted to get the hell off the island, she shot footage to discover Victor Sullivan alive, well, and in need of saving. When zombies had come crawling out of the bowels of the caverns, she had not peed herself and had even put bullets in a few of them.

She had shot down her own helicopter rather than let the bad guy get away.

At the very least, Nathan Drake owed her the best sex of her life.

“You’re thinking so hard I can hear the gears grinding.” Nate bumped against her, hip to hip, as he leaned on the boat railing beside her. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said, surprised at its truth. “Which probably means I’m not, y’know?”

“I do. We almost died today. A lot.” He paused, pretending to count silently on his fingers. “A lot of almost dying...”

“Yeah…” This time, the affirmative became a question.

“We might have nightmares if we try to sleep alone.” His shamelessness, sparkling in his eyes and at the corner of his flat line mouth, made her smile.

“We might.”

“So what do you say?”

The fire singed the insides of her stomach in the heat of his gaze. She bantered anyway.

“Won’t Sullivan have nightmares too?” She asked.

“Oh no, not Sully. He barely even saw those things out there, and he’s so old he’s used to nearly dying.” Nate tossed a look over his shoulder, raised his voice a little, and she watched Victor Sullivan roll his cigar from the right side of his mouth to the left and swallow a chuckle. The old man didn’t bother to pretend he wasn’t eavesdropping. She liked that.

Within an hour, Sully had dropped himself off on a dock, waved goodbye, and told them to shoot anyone who tried to touch his treasure. Nate took over the steering, choosing not to dock them but instead to anchor at a little inlet. He rummaged in the cabin to find a blanket, dirty and stale-smelling, but he held it up like a treasure.

She perched on the rail and watched him lay out stiff orange life jackets on the deck, cover them with the old blanket.

“Only the finest.” Nate swept his arm over the makeshift bed. She laughed and jumped from the rail and tossed her arms around his neck.

“For me? You shouldn’t have,” she teased, but her breath fell away at the soft oof he made when he caught her, his instant of widened eyes and breathlessness that had nothing to do with her weight in his arms. He dipped his head to hers.

Her nerves lit like fireworks under her skin, and she kissed him back while a voice in her heart murmured inaudible, unimaginable promises. He cupped her cheek, licked the inside of her lower lip, and she considered all the places that tongue would go in the coming minutes, the coming hours.

 

\-----------------

 

Elena traced her fingers along the dark discoloration painting Nate’s left shoulder blade. Even in the pale moonlight, his back was a Jackson Pollock, splattered with dried blood, angry bruises, and raised welts. Some primal, instinctive part of her brain aroused at the sight when it should have horrified her. His famous ancestor, Sir Francis Drake, might have borne the same battle scars, many times. They marked Nate a warrior. He snuffled sleepily under her touch.

“I can’t believe I don’t have a condom,” he mumbled into the life preserver he used as a pillow. He lifted his head to appraise her naked body, and she did not move away, letting his eyes reexamine what he had undressed. He groaned and dropped his head back down. “What man over the age of fifteen doesn’t have one in his wallet just in case?”

“Do you even have your wallet?”

“Stop making sense,” he growled.

“I can’t. My brilliance shines through in even the darkest of moments.”

He chuckled and stiffly tossed an arm out beside him, crooking his finger in a come-hither motion. She obligingly laid back down, crawled beneath his arm.

“Tomorrow, I’ll make it up to you. Real bed. A whole box of condoms. The ability to turn my head all the way to the right.” He snorted at his own joke. “It’ll be great.”

“I’ll hold you to that.”

“Want me to take care of you tonight?” The offer plucked her heartstrings like a harp. He continued, voice small and sleepy, “I’m good for that too.”

She turned her head, dropped a kiss on his shoulder, shook her head with her nose pressed into his skin.

“Tomorrow’s good.”

He fell asleep first, dead to the world, and she lay still, memorizing this moment: the faint moonlight dancing over his skin, the gentle, insistent rocking of the waves beneath them, the earthy, pungent smell of adventure on their skin, the quiet desire for him, not for pleasure or distraction or comfort or release, but simply for _him_ , for this one man.

 

\-----------------

 

Tomorrow turned out to be an unintentional lie. They picked Sully up on the dock and smuggled their treasure from this boat to a rented seaplane, from Peru to Colombia, from transportation to a hot, humid apartment just outside Cartagena’s tourist district. On the dock, Elena had paid a child to take a picture of them on a disposable camera bought from the raggedy surf shop. The men had hesitated, uncertain about being documented, but she had moved too quickly to be stopped, urging the kid with a cheery “Adelante!”

She continued to take pictures for the next two days: Sullivan flying the plane and regaling them with a story of a private South African army; Nate carrying a heavy crate of gold and artifacts, strained smile on his lips; the vivid, colorful marketplace in downtown Cartagena. When the last click on the little yellow box didn’t stop, she pocketed it sadly.

A dead houseplant rested on the windowsill of Sullivan’s apartment, a quitter in the fight to keep the air fresh in the mildewy flat. Elena found a cup in one of the cupboards and watered it anyway, just in case. She opened all the windows in the apartment and closed her eyes, breathing in the warm air, the spicy scent of the food vendors down on the street. The view sprawled out before her, stunning, new, interesting. She wanted to dive headfirst into it all and come away with her heart, brain, and lungs full. That familiar desire to _know_ this new place, to discover its secrets and excavate its layers and greet its people, blossomed.

“There’s still daylight. Let’s go out,” she said, looking to Nate.

“Go out? I thought our plan was to… stay in.” He kicked his sock feet up on the coffee table, raised both eyebrows.

She grinned. “In will still be there later.”

“So will out,” he countered, but he began putting his boots back on anyway. Sullivan came out of the bathroom, the TV remote in his pocket like the most important weapon for this terrain. He flicked the old television on and found a baseball game.

“You two really going to ride this sexual tension into another sunset?” He called from the couch as they opened the front door to go out. “Don’t call me when you get arrested for screwing in a Las Bovedas bathroom.”

Nate slipped his hand down to take hers, curved his thumb up the inside of her palm, traced the deep length of her life line without looking. “We won’t get caught,” he mouthed.

“That’s what I thought too, kid,” Sully somehow replied. The door fell shut behind them.

Cartagena thrummed with life, and Nate knew his way around. He pointed out streets and sights to her, expounded on this city’s unique military ties to Francis Drake. History came alive in his blue eyes. His fingers itched their way to his pocket, seeking the journal he had left in the apartment, and then came back up to continue expressing themselves. He dragged her to old dungeons, remade into shopping centers, and cathedrals draped in souvenir tee shirts. She let him lead until he seemed spent, dropping his hands to his sides as if to say, “I’ve shown you everything.”

It was her turn. She bought a bus schedule and caught the next one, chatting in broken Spanglish with a woman in faded scrubs about the medical network. Mariana lamented the need for blood donors and suggested a clothing shop owned by her sister on the other side of town. Elena had her trace the route on her map and thanked her effusively.

In the shop, Elena held up colorful fabrics against her skin while Mariana’s sister, Jimena, gushed to her in ebullient English and about her to Nate in Spanish. Elena knew just enough Spanish to blush. They coaxed her into the fitting room with a gauzy blue beach dress, and when she came out, they both lit up all over again. Elena bought it just to quiet them.

“Your boyfriend is beautiful,” Jimena said as she handed her the receipt. Elena smiled all the way to the next bus stop.

This time, they jumped off at the docks, and Elena watched the men unloading the boats, grunting and straining as they unloaded wet, heavy nets and bins teeming with fish. She bought fresh snapper, wrapped in heavy butcher paper, and asked the fisherman how best to cook it.

In Sullivan’s apartment, she hung her new dress from the knob of the kitchen cabinets and fried her fish to the rhythm of Afro-Colombian radio. Cartagena wrapped around her like a hug, asked her a hundred questions she wanted to answer.  


\---------------------

 

He came to her as if he had needed for her for years, as if every second of his life until this point had been waiting for her to be in his bed. He knelt between her legs and admired until her cheeks burned red and desire thumped in her veins.

“Shit, you’re beautiful,” he murmured, his voice reverent and surprised as a prayer, his mouth crooking sideways in a smile so genuine it melted her. He pinched her nipple, rolled it against the roughened pads of his fingers. They moved together with a slick, wet smack, painful and stretching and satisfying and dizzying. In blurry strokes, he lasted only minutes before shuddering to collapse onto her.

He did not stop. He caught his breath in shaky gasps and rolled to her, his fingers moving to continue the work of his body with gentle insistence and then eager rushing. He whispered encouragements, dirty nothings, as she lost herself to the sensation, lost herself to everything except the desperate ache and its primal rhythm. Her hips bucked to him until he matched her, and together they carried her to her shattering point.

In the quiet of the night, to the backbeat of city bustle through open windows, he came to her again and again. He gave and gave and gave until the well ran dry and she glimpsed the loneliness beneath the shimmering water.

 _You don’t have to impress me. You don’t have anything to prove_ , she thought.

It came unbidden as she rolled to him, slid down to wrap her mouth around his waiting cock. A single thought filling her with promise and terror.

_I’ll stay._

She had never had that thought before.

 

\-----------------

 

Men on her show came in two flavors: the doer and the thinker. The thinkers talked in abstracts, hands waving to release their ideas into the world, little birds meant to fly and grow and become. They overused the word _implications_ and wanted her to interview them in museums, university offices, and classrooms. But they also shone lights into dark places long-forgotten. One professor spent hours showing Elena the evidence of gender egalitarianism in Hopi society through broken artifacts, bringing to life tiny clues on shards of pottery. No matter how Elena fiddled the camera, she had not been able to make this man exciting on camera. His flat, dull voice only resonated in the simple power of his ideas. She liked the thinkers.

The doers wore dirty boots and insisted she meet them in jungle base camps, in open air markets in Malawi. Dirt lived under their nails, and they always looked startled when asked for their home addresses. They scrabbled in the dirt and darkness to find what they could sell or hand off to the thinkers. These men did not want to analyze. They did not want to slow down long enough. Elena liked the doers most of all.

Doers never asked her difficult questions, never made her ask herself difficult questions. Thinkers looked at her camera with hope: _Make this important. Do you understand? Can you make them understand?_ They wanted her camera to change the values of an entertainment world.

Doers just grinned and held up bronze daggers for the viewers at home to take a gander at. Doers got better ratings.

Sometimes she slept with the doers, but she never spent the night, never wanted to wake up beside them in the morning with stinking breath and greasy hair, never wanted to know their flaws in the hazy early sunlight.

When she woke up beside Nathan Drake, she saw a small whitehead on his chin, saw his dick stuck to his stomach in a pool of dried cum, smelled the morning on his breath, but the thought still came again.

_I’ll stay._

She woke him with a kiss.


	2. Chapter 2

_**One Month Later** _

Yesterday morning, Elena had found a small bouquet of orchids in a cup on the kitchen table. Nate had winked at her, asked her if she liked them, and she had smiled back knowingly.

“I’ll have to make sure to thank Nicolas. They’re beautiful,” she had said.

The florist down the street from the apartment had let her spend two days interviewing him and his customers. Her tape recorder, bought for too much money at a local shop, teemed with Spanish she had yet to finish translating. She had snapped many pictures of Nicolas’s fat fingers gently arranging his flowers.

“He said they were ‘para la hermosa Elena.’” Nate had raised an eyebrow.

“Jealous?”

“Nah. Just didn’t know you were the flowers kind of girl.”

“I doubt anyone dislikes seeing something beautiful.”

This morning, a single fragile, beautiful lily, stem broken not cut, lay on top of her camera bag. She tucked it into the vase with the orchids and breathed in its scent.

They were leaving Colombia tomorrow. Nate and Sullivan had finished their work, hours and hours of cataloguing their find, using guidebooks and collectors’ sites to match misminted Spanish coins to their values and markets. Now Sullivan had taken a job in Wales, something “all schmooze,” and Nate had volunteered to take a portion of their coins to a dealer in Madrid. Elena had followed the saga only loosely, waving off their offers to involve her more closely.

“Don’t you want to calculate your cut?” Sullivan had asked

“I trust you,” she had said, and then he had looked truly aghast.

“Never trust anyone.”

Her time in Cartagena had been focused on everything else, getting to know its people, slipping down its seediest streets. Her recorder and camera films had filled up rapidly, first with smiling merchants, then with overworked, underpaid medical workers, and finally, most recently, with prostitutes and pimps from the rojo ligero district. One of the women, dark-skinned and dyed blonde, had shared her story, one bursting at the seams with addiction, abuse, and tragedy, in exchange for photographs of herself to send to family.

“To let them know I’m okay,” she said through a wobbly smile.

Elena had expected zombies to keep her up at night. Instead she tossed and turned to the images of needle-scarred skin and underaged breasts displayed in thin tank tops. A part of her longed for her old ignorant apathy, and that desire shamed her most of all.

She could never step back to the world where evil lived too far away to waste thoughts on, for now she knew such a world had never existed.

On her last day in Cartagena, she gave all the cash she had on hand to a young prostitute and donated blood at the local hospital. It was all she could think to do.

  


\----------------------

  


“Sully wouldn’t leave until you got back,” Nate said when she slipped through the apartment door. He and Sullivan stood around the kitchen counter, heavy with some conversation she would not be privy to, but they both smiled anyway. “I think he’s gotten attached to you.”

“What’s not to like?” Sullivan said. He took her camera bag, placed it on the counter, and then opened his arms for her. She hugged him hard.

“Be safe,” she said.

He chuckled. “You take care of yourself. Stick to the main drag in Madrid. It’s not a good idea to stick your neck down every damn dark alley you find.”

He hugged Nate goodbye too, muttered a gruff “Don’t get into trouble, kid,” and then walked out the door. It shut behind him in a cheerful goodbye, the goodbye of always coming back, no finality to it at all, but still, the apartment became smaller without him.

“I love him.”

“It’s not too late to chase him down and tell him,” Nate said. “Though I’ll admit I thought it was me who was keeping you around.”

She circled around the island and wrapped her hands around Nate’s neck. He huffed out a breath.

“If you think you can seduce me just to distract me from your crush on Victor Goddamn Sullivan…” He said. She put her hand against his inner thigh, pressed her fingers into the rough denim and hard muscle, and he grinned. “Then you just keep right on doing it.”

She kissed him, and the heaviness of the world evaporated in the taste of his mouth and the grip of his hands. He sunk his fingers into her hair, pulling loose the mess, tilting her head back to give himself better access to her mouth. They kissed until the hunger thrumming in their veins sated just enough.

“Y’know I never asked you to come to Madrid,” Nate murmured against her neck.

She understood. “No. You didn’t.”

“I should have asked.” His teeth nipped her collarbone, and his tongue apologized. “I’m new to all this.”

And oh, so was she. For the first days, they had both pretended it made sense, existed in their shared experiences. In the drowsy space between sex and sleep, they had talked about their past lovers, boasted their own exploits like a banner, like a proclamation that neither of them could be deemed the weak link, that both of them could bear dalliances without strings. Then they made love on the roof of the apartment complex with sunrise streaming over them. Then they fell asleep reading on the couch, legs tossed over one another, and woke up with a blanket over them. Then they spent hours playing her recordings, Nate painstakingly and uncomplainingly translating the Spanish for her.

When he bought the tickets to Madrid, he got two without asking because he knew -- they both knew -- the fledgling thing between them already had the wings to fly.

“I want to go,” she replied. “It’ll be an adventure.”

He kissed her again, and she went to shower. When she emerged, he held out the gauzy blue dress, a question in his eyes, and for him, she put it on, left her bobby pins on the bathroom counter and let her hair hang loose. They walked to a bar, ate dinner at a high top table, and drank aguardiente until Elena buzzed.

The bar’s outdoor courtyard doubled as a dance floor, and couples had taken to the space, moving through basic salsa steps to steel drum-infused Latin rhythm. Elena watched a couple’s body language, the mirroring of his hips to hers. Sweat plastered strands of hair to the woman’s face, a trickle of visible sweat trailed down her ample cleavage, and yet she did not slow or step away. The man spun the woman by the edge of her skirt, his other hand sneaking between her legs so briefly any casual viewer would have missed it. Elena swallowed hard.

“Do you want to dance?” Nate asked. She turned to him, startled.

“I don’t know how to salsa.”

“I do.” Her eyes must have given away her surprise, for he laughed. “C’mon. Let me prove myself.”

Under the flashing colored lights wrapped in the columns, Nate led, and Elena followed. She relaxed into his surety, laughed when their shared missteps carried them off beat. He twirled her, and as she returned to the powerful circle of his arms, she let the happiness thump and sing in her veins with the music.

“Where’d you learn to dance?”

“St. Francis’ Home for Boys.” He took a step backward and pulled an embarrassingly bad solo move, made endearing by the knowing grin on his face. “Miss Sarah came twice a week to teach us etiquette and decorum. It’s why I’m so refined.”

“Oh really?”

“Of course,” he whispered this in her ear. “I missed quite a few lessons sneaking out of third story windows and running across the rooftops.”

She pressed her nose into his shoulder. “I don’t know how to do that either.”

“I’ll teach you.”

They danced and drank until they crashed back into Sully’s apartment in a tangle of arms, legs, and small, surprised groans. Their search for a reliable surface ended against the refrigerator; Elena made a small, bleating sound in her throat as Nate pinned her, her breasts pressed flat against the humming machine and his prominent erection pushing her through both layers of fabric.

“Have I mentioned you have a great ass?” Nate murmured, nipping at her earlobe. She pushed back against him, tried to grind, found herself too pinned for even that. A surge of desperate heat kicked through her veins. She tried again, _again_ , again, and even as his knees buckled under his desire, he gave not an inch, holding her there, his breath on her neck, her body aching for him. Everything quivered.

“Yes,” she finally answered his question. He chuckled against her skin.

“Let me prove it to you.”

Their last night in Cartagena imprinted itself in her mind. Years later, she would still dream about it, taste the coppery tang of her bitten lip between her teeth, tremble to the memory of urgent thrusts, only to wake up flushed and slippery.

  


\--------------------------

 

Lights glittered along, around, below her, a city of light, and yet Elena stood in the dark, her intestines tying themselves into terrible, overfilled balloon animals. She worked her mouth, tried to conjure up enough spit to swallow her fear.

The rooftops of Madrid had sounded romantic, like their Cartagena sunrises, but she had misinterpreted Nate’s meaning. He had her poised on the concrete edge of a two story building like a person on a bridge with people calling up to them not to jump. Only he had already hopped over to the other rooftop to shout for her to do that very thing.

“I can’t.” She squeezed her eyes shut, shook her head so hard she gave herself whiplash. Her camera work over the years had led to some climbing, the occasional descent of a rickety ladder into a dig site, but she had never tried to clear a gap of any distance on foot, particularly not from high enough up that looking down made her dizzy.

“C’mon, you chicken. It’s a two story building.” His teeth flashed white in the darkness.

“And an eight foot jump!”

“Seven feet, tops!” His voice softened. “You can’t learn if you won’t try.”

If her stomach hadn’t been playing Ring Around the Rosie with itself, she might have come up with another line of witty banter. Instead she clapped her hands together, bounced a little on her toes like an athlete on the sidelines preparing to go into the game.

“Remind me why I’m doing this?”

He paused, considered it, and she waited for the predictable, quasi-romantic answer about needing the skill for the adventures they would undoubtedly go on together. Nate delivered something else entirely.

“Because I can, and you don’t like to be outdone.”

On the island, she had been in the muck every second Nate had, except when climbing and jumping had been involved. Her limitations had grounded her when two people would have been better than one. She shivered at the memory of waiting in the control room, counting out minutes and making deals with unnamed celestial beings if Nate would only come back alive.

“True enough,” she replied.

She ran toward the edge on fleet feet, guessed the best moment, and pushed off with all the power her legs had to offer. Nate had his hands on her before she even knew she had cleared the distance, steadying her. She couldn’t hear any of his words amidst her laughing relief, but she felt the rumble of his laugh in her bones with hers.

She didn’t fear the next leap, and by the third, she no longer waited for him to go first. She jumped into the blank space between buildings with faith in her own ability to fly.

  


\-------------------

  


Nate did the grocery shopping, and Elena did the cooking. They both studiously avoided the dishes until the task became a thousand times more unbearable, scraping off crusted food and pulling soggy unidentifiable bits from the drain. At the end of the first week, Elena did both of their laundry at a local Laundromat and brought it back in one basket. To find her underwear, she had to rifle through his shirts, and the strange intimacy tickled across her skin.

They played house as surely as a young couple who had a parents’ house to themselves for the weekend. She needed to get back to work, surely he did too, and yet… this was a butterfly perched on her palm, beautiful and special, able to destroyed by a single touch intended to keep it.

Butterflies cannot stay still forever.

The conversation came in the quiet of the night, the coins sold, the weekly rent paid for only one more day. Elena had crawled under the sheets nearly an hour ago, her laptop balanced on her legs, her fingers tapping away at they keys. The blank white of the document had filled up with words on El Dorado, a story she would never publish but her brain itched to tell.

Writing had never been her preferred form of journalism; it was too hard, too punishing, too unforgiving. On camera, she could smile, inflect, flavor her words with every intended meaning. On paper, the words simply sat there before someone else to be interpreted at will, outside of her control. Nevertheless, she tapped her way into another paragraph about the descendent creatures below the old colony. Nate poked his head out of the bathroom, toothbrush still tucked into his cheek.

“We’re done here in Madrid,” he said, and she smiled at the we.

“Yeah, we are.” She shut her laptop and put it on the bedside table. “So what’s next for the famous Nathan Drake? You’ve found what you were looking for.”

He stepped back into the bathroom. She heard the clink of his toothbrush on the counter, and when he walked back out, his face had a tired, guarded look she hadn’t expected. She replayed her words and tried to elaborate.

“Sir Francis Drake turned out to not just be your famous ancestor but also a hero who saved the world. Not that you can prove it.”

“Yeah. There’s more to Drake than disproving his death.” A quiet intensity burned in his voice, but he did not offer her the untold story. “In the meantime, I’ll put out some calls, see where there’s work. What about you?”

“I told my boss I’m not coming back.” Watching the panic flicker across his face made her laugh. She clicked her laptop shut. “Calm down, cowboy. It’s not a proposal. I just don’t want to do reality TV anymore.”

“What do you want to do?” He slipped under the covers and rolled over her. His smile apologized for his earlier flinch. She touched his face, let her thumb touch his bottom lip, her fingers grace the stubble of his cheek. The sweet familiarity of it made her curve up to kiss him before answering.

“I want to dig in a different kind of dirt,” she replied simply, sincerely. “I want to tell stories to make the world better.”

In her mind’s eye, the faces of Cartagena smiled, proud of her for becoming more than she once was.

“I want to steal an artifact from a woman named Catherine Marlowe. In the meantime, making you, me, and Sully rich doesn’t sound so bad.” They both smiled, nuzzled their noses together, but his voice dipped. “I’ll have to travel a lot. I’m guessing you will too.”

She had given this break up speech more than once. At her college graduation, two years after her parents died, she had severed ties with a TA in the graduate program. Their relationship had been hot, wild, heavy, forbidden. The first time they kissed had been during his office hours when she came to dispute her essay grade. Over the desk, their eyes had shot sparks at one another until she made the first move. Then she gave him the speech a few months later: “I’m going to be traveling with my new job, Porter. It doesn’t mean we won’t keep seeing each other, but it changes things. At this point in my life, my career will have to come first.”

She never went back to see him again.

Two years later, she fell into the bed of a cameraman on her crew. He brought her sandwiches on long days of shooting and remembered her birthday when no else in the world still knew it. On their days off, he read aloud from his favorite books of poetry and made her wish she heard the same magic in the words he did. The production company chose him for a different show, and when they parted in a splash of hot, hungry sex, she had delivered the speech: “You’ll travel, and I’ll travel, but we’ll make this our home base. When we’re back in town, we’ll find each other.”

She never called him when she went back to production headquarters.

Suddenly her pulse quickened, her palms dampened. She didn’t want to hear this speech because she knew it too well. She knew what it was: a careful, suave blow-off that didn’t feel like goodbye until months later. It didn’t feel like goodbye until there was so much distance no one had to see anyone else’s pain and regret. More importantly, no one had to see if there was no pain or regret. The lack would have hurt most of all.

“Or we could plan better than that. Travel together.” She laid the words out between them, put all her cards on the table. “Do it all. Have it all.”

Nate considered it, his mouth a straight line. “You want something permanent.”

That word tore through her stomach like _E. Coli_ , but she forced a smile. “I want this to keep going because I’m not tired of fucking you yet.”

It was the right answer. He smiled again.

“You might fall in love with me if you keep seeing how suave and charming I am all around the globe.”

“You might fall in love with me once you realize how impressive I am when I'm working," she countered, smothering a chuckle.

"I'll risk it," Nate said with cheery sincerity.

"Me too." 

Elena felt the truth of her words sign itself across her heart and tried not to worry. Nate brought her a lily, chased her across rooftops, shared his best stories with his lips whispering against her skin. She could trust him.

This might be love. She would risk it.

**Author's Note:**

> I've been playing with a series of these missing moments from the games lately. I've also been working on others from the space between U1 and U2. If they reach a quality level worth posting, I'll link them to this one as either chapters or a series. We'll see. Either way, this one stands alone nicely!


End file.
